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That brings back memories of my first ship in 1968. I had wooden decks and I was assigned to the deck gang for two weeks. Every morning at 4:30 we had to get up to holystone the decks for two hours before breakfast. Holystone was like a brick on a wooden handle that was used to clean and polish the wood. Good times.

Wouldn't they had to have used a flash for this photo? I wouldn't think so many of the faces would have turned out blurry with such a quick exposure.

[Flash powder exposures were not all that quick. Since there's no synchronization between the camera and the flash, the shutter is opened before the charge is set off and closed after it dies out -- a duration of least a second or two. Maybe quite a bit longer, if the photographer has no assistant. - Dave]

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.